Live From Sundance: A GQA with James Murphy

The LCD Soundsystem honcho on the Sundance documentary about his band's last stand

At the midnight screening of Shut Up and Play the Hits, fans nodded their heads and clapped along in their seats, as 13 cameras roamed around LCD Soundsystem's last-ever gig at Madison Square Garden. The concert was a super-sized wake, with chorus singers dressed in silver, cameos from Arcade Fire, Reggie Watts, and a dozen others—and a huge explosion of white balloons that rained down from the Knicks' rafters during the final (very final) encore. The film captures the surprisingly huge sound of the band's go-out-with-a-big-bang last stand, and the bizarre purgatory of bandleader James Murphy, as he wakes up with his French bulldog in the first few hours after disbanding one of the generation's most beloved bands. In the film, Murphy tells Chuck Klosterman that he ended the band because he wanted to have a family and a normal life, because he didn't enjoy the lifestyle of fame. Aloud, he also worries that he somehow failed by not embracing the superstar opportunity, was shirking "the responsibility of being bigger." The morning after the film's midnight premiere, we caught up with Murphy and the film's directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, about 12 hours before dancing half the night to a killer four-hour DJ set by LCD's Nancy Whang and James Murphy, who may have left the band, but can't quite leave the stage.

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GQ: For the concert footage, did you really just film the one show? Or did you splice in coverage from the other MSG shows?

James Murphy: Yes. It's all the last show.

GQ: In "Losing my Edge," there's that long litany of important music moments you list, "I was there…" And now, all these people, like me, come up to you saying, "I was at Terminal 5, I was at MSG." How does that feel? And why don't you talk to any fans in the documentary?

James Murphy: We tried to cut the fans out entirely. [Sarcastic.]

Dylan Southern: Yeah, we didn't really want to film anyone, but they were just there.

James Murphy: There was no other way to shoot the show.

GQ: Chuck Klosterman asks you a lot of big-picture questions in the documentary, and you don't really answer many of them. At one point, he asks you about how much of the appeal of the band is the music itself, and how much is the way it fits this particular cultural moment. You come down hard on the side of saying it's cultural. But you don't describe what that means, what the band kind of stands for or represents in fans' imaginations. Can you try to unpack that?

James Murphy: Well, it's a soft logic thing. It's a difficult thing. It feels different to people. And people have a lot of different reasons why they feel it's different. But the kind of universal thing is that it feels different to them than other bands. It might feel different to them than other bands in that they like the music better, or it feels more honest, or weirder. I don't know. It's just something about it feels different to people. It's a pretty normal band in a lot of ways. It's like a pop band. We sing some songs. It's not like, avant-garde or anything like that. But I think we approached it with our own way. It's a very closed system. So, when we started doing the film, we talk a lot about making the film with a bit of a closed system. Like, not trying to make a traditional rock concert film or not trying to make a traditional documentary. Instead of telling certain cinematographers to cover this or that, in a kind of a soft-logic, intuitive way, they sent them out there. So, it's just a closed-system thing. I think that [the directors] made the film line up with that. Otherwise, it would have been a very awkward fit. You'd be trying to make it seem like a different kind of band.

Will Lovelace: That's one of the reasons why it was never going to be a biography film about the history of LCD. It was never going to be that type of film because it needed to be more specific than that in a way. It had to come from that moment. It's all about those 48 hours and that final show.

James Murphy: If you were making a story about an entirely fictional band, unless it was funny and like Spinal Tap, you would make a story about a person and what happens in a period of time that has some resonance with the past and some resonance with the future. And since our band isn't that popular, it makes more sense to make a story that you don't have to be a fan of the band to want to know what happened. We wanted to make a film. A movie.

Dylan Southern: A film you could get into if you had never heard of that band: That was the hope.

Will Lovelace: With as little exposition as we could get away with.

GQ: It is so up-close. But someone else trying to make an accessible documentary might have taken a different route, with talking heads framing it or explaining the band, or a few words on screen so the audience knows it's Reggie Watts or Arcade Fire on stage with you.

James Murphy: Right. But the principle thing is like you said, the word: documentary. We didn't want to make a documentary. We wanted to make a narrative movie. A story. There's fans that know us and like us and they know the information they need to know.

Dylan Southern: And if you don't know it, it's a band and a guy who's quitting. This is the last show. That's enough, I think.

James Murphy: Yeah. It's a band playing a show that size that's just quitting.

Dylan Southern: And it definitely feels like this isn't what you did for the last 400 nights, playing Madison Square Garden.

GQ: Right. LCD was hardly an arena band, playing MSG or the O2 Arena.

James Murphy: No. Never the O2 Arena.

Will Lovelace: The Vegas years…

James Murphy: That's next. That's part two. That's the sequel.

GQ: James, when did you know you had to end it? Did you wake up one day and know? Did something awful happened that pushed you over the edge?

James Murphy: That's why there's five different answers to the question of "why end the band," because there's five different ways where it just felt right. It's a soft-logic thing. So, it's not like that's it, terrible day. It's not like the movie where the guy quits and goes out and shoots people. What is that movie?

Will Lovelace: Falling Down.

James Murphy: Yeah. It's not Falling Down. I'm sorry if that's too boring of an answer for you.

GQ: There's also no moment in the film where you address how the other band members reacted to your decision.

Will Lovelace: Because of the kind of set of rules we applied to ourselves, that wasn't within that moment that we were trying to kind of capture. I don't know if that moment ever happened.

James Murphy: No. We'd be falsifying things to show me sitting on a beach looking outside and then, How do I tell them? It didn't work like that. I'm like, "Maybe we should just stop." Everyone's like we always knew we were going to stop. So, it just was a matter of, "Oh, that would be a great place to stop."

GQ: How did the rest of the band members react?

James Murphy: There was never a moment we sat down and had a meeting about it. It was just a part of our dialogue. We're all friends. It's not an office. Like, I didn't go into work. It's like these are people I just hang out with all the time. So, we all just knew that was what was going to happen at some point. Then it was like, How about Madison Square Garden? That would be an awesome place to stop. It was like, h yeah, that makes sense.

GQ: The music sounds incredible—and there's so much going on.

Dylan Southern: The sound was important. How we shot it, we wanted to make it feel as close as you could be to the experience of being there. So, the camera people were kind of in positions that a fan might be or a member of the band.

Will Lovelace: It was interesting. When we first went to MSG just to do a tech scout and stuff it was Bon Jovi...two techno cranes and this automated rig. That's the antithesis to what our project was. Not because we didn't have enough money.

James Murphy: Yeah. 11 cinematographers is not cheap. 13.

Will Lovelace: It was very old-school the way we did it. We weren't sitting there with headsets watching the monitors.

Dylan Southern: Yeah, suddenly, Spike [Jonze] is shooting a couple kissing in the crowd through the whole song. And then because we weren't assigning coverage, we didn't get the detail on the guitar, which made the edit tricky.

James Murphy: Well, because you don't realize if an instrument starts and you don't see it, it can be very disorienting. When you do see it you don't think of it. It just goes by your head. So, we had a lot of chasing around.

GQ: I was kind of amazed you were standing, James. How many hours did you perform in that last week?

James Murphy: It was four in a row of about three hours, and then a day off, and then the four-hour.

GQ: How were you feeling physically?

James Murphy: My voice is actually still not the same. I've permanently damaged my voice. "Jump Into the Fire" was the one. At Terminal Five, I felt it go. I was just like, "I have to do this." It felt great. The "Jump Into the Fire" at Madison Square Garden was like the death of my voice forever. I could feel it.

GQ: In the film you say your biggest regret about the band might be your decision to end it. Or not. Do you feel differently now?

James Murphy: I still feel the exact ambivalence. Like the exact, identical… You know, no idea.

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